$7.69 Million Verdict for Forceps Birth Injury, Payment Set by Confidential Settlement Range
After trial: The sum actually paid was fixed by a settlement range the parties agreed before the verdict and is confidential.
Won by Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci.
Mary Hunt sued Dr. Larry Clark and Freeman Health System after forceps used during her son's 2016 delivery caused bleeding deep in his brain and a stroke that damaged the left hemisphere. A Jasper County jury found both defendants negligent after an eight-day trial in Joplin and returned $7,688,861.10 on September 17, 2019. Before the verdict came in, both sides had agreed to settle within a range keyed to whatever number the jury chose, so the amount the family actually received stayed confidential.
What happened
Mary Hunt was admitted to Freeman Health System in Joplin on July 31, 2016, to deliver her first child. She had a perforated eardrum at the time, a detail that would matter later, because the defense pointed to it as the reason her doctor reached for forceps.
On August 1, after about an hour and a half of pushing, the baby was close to entering the birth canal. Dr. Larry Clark, who was at the end of a 16-hour on-call shift, told her he was going to help, according to the account Hunt, the baby's father and a friend who was in the room gave at trial. Hunt testified that Clark never said he was using forceps and that she had not agreed to their use.
Her case was that the forceps were not medically necessary, that the labor was progressing normally, and that Clark placed the instrument on the wrong parts of the infant's head and then twisted and pulled hard enough to cause bleeding deep in the brain. That bleed caused a stroke that, in her lead counsel's words to the jury, wiped out the left hemisphere of the boy's brain, the side that governs movement and speech on the right side of the body. Apart from abrasions left by the forceps, nothing was visible from the outside.
The defense disputed the cause. Its expert witnesses offered competing explanations for the brain damage, including that the child had suffered a stroke before he was ever born, and the defense maintained Clark used the forceps to spare Hunt the ear pain that worsened each time she pushed.
By the time of trial the boy had right-sided hemiplegia along with speech and developmental delays. He had not been expected to walk at all. He was walking with a walker and dragging his right foot, and his lawyers told the jury he would always speak with a slur and would struggle to string words into sentences well enough to make himself understood.
The trial ran eight days in Jasper County Circuit Court before Judge Dean Dankelson. Roger Johnson and Tatianya Scholfield of Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci tried the case for the family. Kent Hyde and David Overby of Hyde, Love & Overby defended Clark and the hospital. The jury took about five hours to find both defendants negligent, returning $33,317.66 in past economic damages, $150,000 in past noneconomic damages, $792,967.50 in future economic damages, $4,712,575.94 in future medical damages, and $2,000,000 in future noneconomic damages, a total of $7,688,861.10. The future medical award matched the life care plan the plaintiffs had put in front of the jury to the dollar.
What the jury decided was not the last word on the money. The two sides had already agreed to settle within a range tied to the verdict figure, whatever it turned out to be, an arrangement defense counsel described as taking away the extremes for both sides. The amount the family received under that agreement is confidential. No appeal followed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Kara Hansen was a 16-year-old Riverton, Kansas high school student when Corbin Hamilton rear-ended her 1966 Ford Mustang in Cherokee County on April 9, 2014, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the chest down. After a five-day trial in Cherokee County District Court, a jury found Hamilton fully at fault and awarded Hansen $38.5 million, including $18 million for future medical and life-care costs and $18 million in noneconomic damages. Kansas's statutory cap on noneconomic damages, which applied to claims arising before July 1, 2014 and was not struck down until more than a year after this trial, held that portion of the award to $250,000, putting the judgment that could be entered at roughly $20.75 million. Hamilton carried only a small liability insurance policy, leaving full recovery in doubt.
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A Greene County jury found that Dr. Chandria Johnson's delivery maneuvers, rather than the natural forces of labor, caused a brachial plexus nerve injury to a newborn boy identified as K.L. during his November 2014 birth at a Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities facility. Despite six corrective surgeries, the boy was left with permanent weakness in his arm. The jury returned a verdict of $2,348,338.60 against Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities and Dr. Johnson, and because the injury predated Missouri's 2015 noneconomic damages cap statute, the noneconomic award was not subject to a cap.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
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A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.